Democrats to Raise Taxes By the Billions

When the Democrats took over Congress in 2006, I saw this coming. I remember going to work the next day and having a couple guys laughing at me because I was a Republican and they were Democrats.

I said, “You watch. Your taxes are gonna go through the roof.”

“Well, what do you mean?” they asked.

“You just watch.”

I love being right, but in this particular instance, I really wish I were dead wrong:

The Senate rejected calls from both parties’ presidential candidates to take an election-year break from pork-barrel spending as a Democratic-run Congress passed budget plans that would torpedo hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts won by President Bush.

They had a chance to stop all earmarks, and not even the Republicans voted for it. Fiscal conservatism, my great Aunt Petunia:

The practice of inserting “earmarked” spending into legislation is seen by lawmakers in both parties a birthright power of the purse awarded to Congress by the Founding Fathers.

Earmarks have exploded in number and cost in recent years, accompanied by charges of abuse and public outrage over egregious examples like the proposed “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska, which would have cost more than $200 million to serve an island with a population of about 50.

McCain, who has battled with members of both parties over them for years, blamed pork barrel spending for the Republicans losing control of Congress in the 2006 elections.

“This may be the last bastion in America where they don’t get it,” he told reporters after Thursday night’s vote. “Americans are sick and tired of the way we do business in Washington. As president, I promise the American people … the first earmarked, pork-barrel bill that comes across my desk, I’ll veto it.”

I hope he wins and I hope this is a promise he keeps. I actually saw someone write on another website that not all earmarks are bad. Um, yes they are. They are unnecessary spending by the federal government for things that should be paid for by the state or local governments. Sorry, but that just how it is.

The House passed its $3 trillion budget plan by a 212-207 vote. It would provide generous increases to domestic programs but bring the government’s ledger back into the black, but only by letting all of Bush’s tax cuts expire at the end of 2010 as scheduled.

The Senate passed a companion plan by a 51-44 vote. It endorsed extending $340 billion of Bush’s tax cuts but balked at continuing all of them. The competing versions head to talks in which the House is all but certain to accept the Senate’s position endorsing tax cuts for the working poor, married couples, people with children and for those inheriting large estates.

So in the end, rather than cut spending, they increase it, and increase taxes. Increasing spending in areas that James Madison and other Founding Fathers would never have tolerated spending. And to pay for those increases, they increase taxes and then try to tell us they are doing us a favor.

The excess and unnecessary spending is going to destroy this country. It won’t be an outside force. We are doing it to ourselves.

There is a quote, one that has several sources attributed to it, but it is a profound quote. It is necessary to repeat it here as a reference for what is going on in America today. It is generally attributed to Alexander Tytler, but as I noted, the source isn’t definite. It reads:

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.

Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.

I see America on the bridge from apathy to dependence. We are not too far from once again being in bondage.

It is the outrageous spending and the apathy of Americans that is creating this scenario.